Jumboreel at Tapadum: An Evening of Irish Folk

February 8 brought something different to our home concert series — not Mediterranean, not Anatolian, not Balkan. Just clean, honest Irish folk, played by three musicians from Emilia-Romagna who had spent years learning to do it properly.

Fourteen people came. Sixty-six more had been thinking about it.

Jumboreel: Irish Folk Without Compromise

Jumboreel was founded in 2014 by Luca Virga with a clear intention: to play healthy Irish folk without falling back on electric guitars and the trappings of pub-rock. From the beginning, the commitment was to the acoustic tradition — its instruments, its textures, its rhythmic honesty.

The core lineup took shape quickly with violinist Marco Rocchi, and the two began working through the Irish classical repertoire while also seeking out lesser-known material with the right “irish attitude” — that particular combination of drive, precision, and feeling that separates folk music played from the inside from folk music played as imitation.

After some lineup changes, percussionist Alex Magnani completed the trio and gave the band an additional creative push. Rather than expand further, the three decided to make the most of their collective multi-instrumental abilities — between them covering violin, bouzouki, mandolin, banjo, tin whistle, and bodhrán. The result is a sound that is both complete and flexible, able to shift texture mid-set without losing its identity.

Terramare: See and Hear for Yourself

Their first official music video, Non Stanotte, is taken from the debut album Terramare — directed by Enrico Zavalloni at Atomic Studio. It gives a good sense of the band’s warmth and the world they build around their music: watch Non Stanotte:

Terramare is available on all major platforms — listen on Spotify or find it on iTunes.

The album contains nine tracks of folk “alla Jumboreel” — Irish and Celtic influences placed within a broader folk context, where the songs are told like stories by a fireplace on a cold winter night, one glass of wine at a time. That image describes something real about how the band approaches performance: warmly, without pretension, with the sense that the music exists to bring people together rather than to demonstrate technical superiority.

Live and on the Street

Jumboreel has always maintained an intense live schedule, performing both in traditional venues and as buskers — playing on the street in a rawer form while keeping their sound intact. That dual experience shows. A band that has played in a town square on a Saturday afternoon develops a different relationship with an audience than one that has only performed on stages. They read the room. They know when to drive and when to settle.

At Tapadum, on a February evening with fourteen people in a room that smelled of wood and old strings, that quality was exactly what was needed.

An Evening Worth Reserving

By this point in our concert series, we had begun asking new arrivals to reserve — not to be exclusive, but because the space is small and we wanted everyone to have a proper seat. The music deserved that. So did the audience.

Tapadum hosts concerts from across Europe and the Mediterranean. Explore our handcrafted instrument collection or follow our upcoming events.

Özgür Yalçın is the founder of Tapadum and the founding member of Karagüneş. He has performed ethnic and world music across Europe for over twenty-five years and builds custom instruments from Tapadum’s workshop in Brisighella, Italy.